Do you batch your emails? Can batching improve your email marketing? Does it make the process any easier or quicker?

We’re Kennedy and Fifi, and these are some of the questions we answer in this podcast episode because we’ve all been there - staring at a daunting list of emails to send, not knowing where to begin.

Let's go!

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What are some really creative ways that you can batch a whole bunch of emails really, really quickly without pulling your hair out and without going absolutely mad? That's what we're going to talk about today. Oh yeah, it's email marketing Wednesday. You ready heroes? And this is the email marketing show.

It's time for a no bullshit look at how to make more sales from that email list of yours. Let's do it. Hello and welcome to the show.

I'm Fifi Mason from FifiMason.com. And I'm Kennedy from emailmarketingheroes.com. Now, I've got a treat for you. I'm going to read this from the registration page. I've put together a brand new class, which has only been around for a few weeks.

And the feedback has been amazing. We've called it the easiest and most predictable way for coaches and course trainers to hit regular 10k months from their existing audience. And the method that I share on this new class uses no AI for you to keep up with and figure out.

It involves no new offers for you to launch. It's your existing, existing offer. And I think you'll really get a lot out of this.

And it's the exact method I use to create consistent sales in businesses and get them to that 10k consistent month thing, especially for course creators and coaches. If you go to emailmarketingheroes.com slash free class, emailmarketingheroes.com slash free class, you can register for free. It's on demand so you can watch it at your fancy.

It sounds awesome. Really good. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

What's happening in your world? Because it's October. I mean, can you believe it? Here we are, bloody October. Which obviously, whenever somebody says October, we instantly think of Halloween.

Are you a Halloween person? I mean, I know we're probably in a couple of weeks time going to probably have a much more deep and more topical Halloween conversation, but are you a Halloween dresser-rubberer? I am. And I suppose if I'm going to be doing something, I should figure out what I'm going to do and find an outfit. But I do like to dress up and go to parties and things.

Yeah, what kind of costume person are you? I change it up, I think. I was once an elf. That was quite nice.

It's quite fun. I've been a zombie. That was fun.

What was your zombie like? Well, I did the whole, like, I don't know what they put. It's like stuff that you can put on your face to make you look like you've got cuts on your face and things. And then, yeah, and then you ripped clothes and the blood everywhere.

It's really fun. It's really fun. Because people take it in different ways.

In Newcastle, where they all go out like party city in the UK, it's all about you're sort of dressed up, but you're mostly just wearing a pair of devil horns and you've got boobs and bum showing. Yeah, the sexy versions. Sexy Halloween.

And then there's like people who really take it seriously. The only costume I've ever done for Halloween was I dressed up as, I wish I could remember his name, the guy from Clockwork Orange. Oh, I have no idea.

It's been a long time since I've seen that film. Yeah. Alex from Clockwork Orange.

So I had like eyelashes on one eye and the hat. And I think I had like an orange boiler suit and stuff. Yeah.

Fun. That sounds like fun. Yeah.

To be honest, I don't always go to the parties. Being a massive introvert, I tend to stay home for a lot of things. But if I'm home and there's going to be trick-or-treaters, I actually avoid that.

So I'm a bit of a bar humbug when it comes to that. Yeah. What's your strategy for avoiding trick-or-treaters? My mum, because we had no money growing up at all, so we couldn't even, we couldn't afford to give trick-or-treaters anything.

My mum would be like, would make a game out of it. We would like hide behind the sofa and turn all the lights off and that kind of thing. I can imagine you doing that on your own.

Is that what you do? Lights off, hide under a duvet. I try to be out of the house doing something else if I can be, so I don't have to open the door to random people. But then if I'm in, yeah, I just have the smallest light on and all the curtains drawn so that nobody can see that I'm home.

Some people sort of pathetic out at a halfway house, which is they don't want to engage with the trick-or-treaters. So they leave like a bucket of stuff on the step and say, help yourself. Yeah, but then they just take advantage and then you'll find that within half an hour they've all gone because someone's just poured them all into there.

Yeah, that's true. Yeah, yeah. A real haul.

A real haul. I once went to Disney for Halloween. That was fun.

I did the Disney trick-or-treat thing. I hadn't been to Disney Florida before and that was, that was fun. Yeah, that would be fun.

I would like to do something a bit different for Halloween one time, like go to one of those ghost tours or like an escape room. Stay overnight in a haunted castle or a hotel. Murder mystery night.

That would be so much fun. I've never actually been to one of those murder mystery things. The only murder mystery nights I've ever seen have been on TV shows about murders and the murder happened at a murder mystery night, you know, that kind of cheesy, cheesy old thing.

Today we're talking about how to batch emails. That's what we're here for, isn't it really? Yeah. That's the crack.

Let's talk about when you might need to do this. So one of the things that you and I were talking about when we were planning this episode, I know what you're thinking. They plan this shit.

I know, imagine. Why would you need to batch and when would you need to batch? And an example is, let's say you're going to go on holiday. You're going to go on a vacation and take a trip or you're just like, Hey, I'm going to take the whole week off.

I just want to like get some stuff done because I'm doing a project. Or if you have a lengthy sequence you need to create, that's a kind of batching. That's a kind of batching.

It's a kind of batching. You like me in that sense. If I hear like a phrase, a song comes up in my head.

Yeah. You just can't get it out of your head. Like, yeah, absolutely.

There is a song for everything. There is. But yes, if we go on holiday, if we are creating something that's quite a long campaign, you're going to want to kind of make it easier on yourself by batching some of that.

Yeah. And so I think one of the first things to do is to create a framework of prompts to help you. And people think of prompts now being an AI thing used for JackJayUT.

I don't mean that at all. I mean, a framework of prompts to prompt your brain to think of the types of emails that you want to send. I mean, you're the framework queen.

You think in frameworks, you teach frameworks, you teach people how to framework their thinking. This is your thing, really. Yeah.

I love frameworks because it just helps you to break things down in an easy to follow system. And it just makes everything simpler. It's not even just the action.

It's getting clear on your thinking in that way as well. Being able to figure out the steps forward because you have this framework to follow. And there's so many different frameworks that you can use to kind of do that.

I'm sure we can get into some of them. But yeah, I think being clear on the types of emails you want to send is like the first step that you need to really be thinking about. Yeah.

And we'll get into some prompts to prompt your brain in a bit, but we've really broken down batching into four stages. Because I think if you just go, right, I now need to sit and write five emails or 10 emails or 30 emails, that's like a daunting task. But if you do them in phases, because one of the trickiest things is changing tasks and having to change the type of thinking and activity you're doing, going from a creative task to an analytical task to a practical task.

All these things require different parts of your brain to be engaged and you need to work in a different way. So that's why I like to think of it all in these four phases. And the first phase is what we call the plan phase.

And that is to come up with, okay, what's the purpose of this bunch of emails? Has it got a particular call to action? Is it a particular offer? So let's say a call to an offer that you're going to be using in this batch. And that's the first thing. The purpose is to get people to buy this thing or register for that thing or to apply for that thing or to register their interest on the waitlist or whatever.

So making sure you know exactly the singular purpose, and that's the really important thing, the singular purpose of these emails, keeping it to that rule of one. Sarah Kennedy Yeah. And I think that's a really key thing when you're writing your emails to make them simple, a simple purpose, a simple reason for each one of them.

And I talk about your why all the time. It's very important in all aspects of business, but you should always know why you're doing something. So the planning stage is to just get clear on that, to be absolutely clear that you are going to do something for a specific reason.

So yeah, plan is the first step. Will Second step then. Sarah Kennedy That is idea generation.

We're breaking these down into four different things because they're such different mentalities. And they take different kinds of focus. So when you're in the idea generation phase, it's completely different to what comes next, which is writing and then beyond that.

It's really being able to focus on coming up with the ideas around what you're going to write in your emails, what you're going to put in them and starting with that part. Will And when we say idea generation, what we're not talking about is actually writing the emails yet. That's not yet.

So we've already got a plan of why, like what's the purpose, like we're going to be promoting this particular class or this thing or this program, this event. Next is ideas for what each of the emails are. So the way that I do it is I go, cool, I've got five days of emails to write.

And how many emails do I want that to be? Do I want that to be five emails? Do I want them to also be one email a day? Or do I want it to be one email the first day, nothing on the second day, two emails the next day, one and one and one? How do I want it to be? So how many emails is it going to be? When I list that out, I just write down in a Google doc, all of this in a Google doc for me, because it means I'm not looking at the technology. I'm not having to deal with, how am I going to do this? I have a complete disregard for the technology when I'm writing and planning and designing a campaign. So I'm going to go, okay, it's a five day campaign.

I know if it's an offer closing type campaign where something closes, like you can't register anymore or you can't buy anymore or whatever. I know on that last day, I'm probably going to send at least two emails, sometimes three just to make sure people don't miss out on it because I feel that's important. So I'm going to write down, okay, it's a five day thing, but on the last day, it's going to be three emails.

That's going to be a seven email campaign. Maybe on the first day, I might send two emails. So now that's an eight email campaign.

All I'm going to write in that Google doc is email one, day one, email two, day one later, email three on day two. I'm going to just write that all the way through so I can see all the emails. Then next to each of those, I'm going to go back through.

So now decide on the frequency and the quantity. I'm going to go back through and give each of those emails a theme, a hook, an angle, and that's going to create this framework. So I know that, for example, the last email is going to be basically the closing email.

It's the final reminder. I'm going to write that next to that. And I know at some point I'm going to probably have, oh, I've got a great story to tell about that time this person had success using the framework I'm going to teach.

So it might be at somebody called Jerry. So it means email number four, I'm going to write Jerry's story. Great.

And then I know that email number one is going to be like introducing the pain, the problem that it solves. And I'm going to just go through each of the emails and decide on a theme for each of the emails. Now, for all of you who have our email hero blueprint, that's what we give you inside of those email campaigns.

You have the theme for every single email in those campaigns so that you don't feel like you're constantly using the same thing. You're constantly trapped using the same, oh, our email one's always like the announcement email number two, social proof. If you become as formulaic, that's why you have those frameworks.

Each of the emails has its theme, has what we call its hook. So you're going to go through and you're going to create the hooks. What's really nice now is the third stage of actually writing the emails is just expressing the idea.

You're not generating ideas. You've already generated ideas. You now get to sit in your writer's chair, put your smoking jacket on and imagine that you're Ernest Hemingway, right? And be the writer and express the idea.

And you can't get lost. You can't end up going off topic because all you're going to do is write about that idea. Yeah, that's number three, like getting to the writing stage.

And I think it's a bit of a different creative space compared to idea generation, which is quite quick. And you just come up with that theme. Then when you start to write, you're really getting deeper into a different mentality of writing and being specific on what you're trying to convey.

And so splitting those out into different tasks, maybe doing it at different times, like at a time when you feel more creative as well. That is key. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And just finding that time, you know, like you do your best writing in the morning. That's the way I do. Then do it in the morning.

If you do it better late at night, do it late at night. If it's mid afternoon, it's about like pick the time that's right for each of these things. That's what's really nice about using different parts of your brain and doing these different tasks at different times is you get to choose the time of day or the time of the week or the time of the month or whatever you want that is most suitable to produce that content.

Sometimes the day where I'm like, I need to just be clicking stuff. Like I don't do any thinking and being creative and trying to be fun. I just need to be clicking stuff.

And that's what I'm doing, like downloading receipts for my accountant and like all that sort of shit. You don't want to be like trying to force yourself to be fun and funny. That's why we don't record this podcast at like six o'clock in the evening.

I'd be useless. Yeah. Yeah.

You just got to recognize when you're in the right space for these things. And I think by breaking them down by kind of categorize them by the brain power that they take, that's when you can really determine when you're going to do them at the right time for you. And being an introvert and working with introverts, this is a key thing when I work with my clients, because we have to be conscious of when we are expending certain types of energy and be very clear on when we're going to work our best at certain jobs.

So when you break them down in this way, it just makes things so much easier. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

The final phase, then the fourth and final phase, after we've planned, we've had ideas, we've got those hooks, then we've written the emails, probably in Google Docs is what I do. What's the final phase? The final phase is building it out in your platform. And sometimes I can be in a really nerdy mood and really, really want to just do this rather than the kind of writing and creative side.

I just want to get into the logic of setting it all up and getting it in there. And that is the final phase when you've got it all put together and you can just get it all set up in the system. So that's the four phases of actually batching some stuff.

We thought we couldn't leave you on this episode without giving you some prompts of ideas of email ideas and email hooks to use when you're batching stuff. So let's rattle through some of them. I'll let you take it from here.

Okay. Yeah. So we have five that we've come up with for this.

And the first one is to focus on the problems that you are trying to solve with your services, within your business, and what your clients are struggling with the most. So that's the first thing. And that lets people know that what you're talking about is relevant to them.

That's the whole point of it. The second thing is what I call the problems of those problems. What are the knock-on effects? What are the things that are being impacted because of that problem? So if it's in the world of relationships, the fact that they're struggling to find a partner, let's say you're in the sort of dating niche, right? And you do some kind of dating coaching.

I know we have a few people who do that. So the problems of the problems, they might be like, oh, well, I feel like I just need a partner, but you could really talk about the problems of the problems. That means you've got nobody to, I mean, I don't want to get too grim about it, but like, what are all the problems that are caused when it's hard to find a partner or it's hard to know who to trust? And you feel like you're wasting lots of time and you feel like, who do you go to that wedding with in the summer? And who do you get a gift from at Christmas? And are you staring at the mailbox on Valentine's Day? Like, I'm not saying it has to be as crude as that, but what are the additional knock-on problems? If it's to do with weight loss, it's not just about losing weight, but it's about your self-image.

It's about how you feel about yourself. It's about how happy you are. It might have a knock-on effect in relationships.

Like, what are the additional problems that whatever your macro problem is, is actually causing? And that actually, by doing this, what this does is it makes solving the problem, finding a solution, i.e. buying your solution, urgent, because they suddenly see, oh, this is having a bigger impact than I had first realized. Yeah, I like this one. And I actually have a framework that can help with that actually, and it's called PAR.

So you start with the problem, and then you could also look at the actions or non-actions that that problem causes, and then the result of those actions and non-actions. So when you break it down in this way, it means that you can see how the problem is affecting them in their lives, the things they're not doing because of the problem in the first place, the things that they are doing because of the problem in the first place, and then the result of that, what it actually does in their life, how it impacts them in some way. So just going through to really get clear on the negative results that are coming from the problem in the first place.

And it just, yeah, it gives you lots of inspiration when you do this. That's cool. That's such a good framework.

I really, really like that. Another prompt that you can use, these are not any particular order, these are just anything you could use, is to talk about what they've tried before to solve the problem and why it hasn't worked. And this builds empathy.

And the fact that you're showing that you understand and you sympathize with what they've tried before. Because most people, by the time they've come to you, have tried other solutions first, right? You've probably tried email marketing and doing something or been thinking about email marketing before you listened to this episode and before you heard about us. People have tried other things before they've got to you.

So express what they've tried. That makes people go, oh, you actually understand me, and then show them why it hasn't worked. They go, huh, that makes sense.

So what they've tried, why it hasn't worked. I like this one as well, because it makes it very real and relatable in terms of that you're acknowledging their truth, the struggles they've been through to solve this problem. And you're kind of showing them that, in essence, it's not their fault that they haven't solved it yet in some way.

So it's very relatable and it can build a lot of connection to just be honest about these things and authentic. Yeah, absolutely. The next idea is to introduce your unique solution, like show people what it is you can do, what your program does that uniquely solves this problem that they've got.

And the unique thing is important, because if it's not unique, it might be the same thing they've heard of before, tried before or thought of before and haven't had success with. So you need to show people why your unique solution actually works. Yeah, and number five is proof.

And that could be stats, testimonials, stories, and your own story as well, like actually sharing how you've been through something and overcome it with the solution, that unique solution that you're offering. Yeah, absolutely. So there you go.

There's some prompts for you for your batching to take people through a bunch of ideas to introduce a product or a service or an offer or something you want them to do. Hopefully you found those useful. With all that said, let's go to this week's subject line of the week.

This one is tap dancing Christian doodles. I have no idea what this is about. This is hilarious.

So this is a really simple technique. What I did in the email, again, I wrote the subject line after I'd written the email. And all I did was in the email, I was telling the stories about three clients.

I was talking about a tap dancing membership that is a customer of ours. I was talking about another guy, that was a woman called Hilary Marie, who's maybe on the podcast, a guy called Brad, who teaches Christian musicians how to get their music heard by more people. And a woman called Emily and her results are running a campaign with us who helps people to doodle, to draw.

I think that's therapy and all that sort of stuff. So I just took three unrelated ideas and jammed them together into what sounds like a crazy concept and put them into a subject line. And taking random things, which you then relate together in email, of course, has to satisfy the subject line, and putting them together, it makes people go, what on earth is he doing or talking about? And it really makes people want to open that email.

So it's tap dancing Christian doodles. Really simple technique, and you can do it anytime. Would you put commas in though, or would it just be the words on their own? No, because the commas makes it sound like they are separate ideas, which kills the curiosity.

Yeah, that makes sense. So I'm purposely using bad grammar, as usual. That's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it.

And if you too would like to throw abandon to the idea of great grammar and actually just get really good results from your email marketing, and just write how you speak and use really good email marketing, we've got a free class at emailmarketingheroes.com slash free class, where I'll show you exactly how to do that, how to use something I call hybrid email marketing. And one of the things I show you in that is really cool. It's the one way that every single successful online business owner that you've ever heard of makes the vast majority of their sales from their email list.

And I'll show you how to set it up and make it on complete autopilot. That's just one of the things I teach you in my class. So if you'd like to learn that, as well as how to really create consistency in your email marketing sales, go to emailmarketingheroes.com slash free class to get access to that.

Yeah, amazing. And there's just been some really great stuff in today's episode. So go and have another listen if you missed anything and make some notes because it really, really interesting and unique ways to batch your content and your emails.

So thank you so much for listening today. We will be back with a new episode next week. So if you're new to the show, be sure to subscribe so you don't miss out.